New Tahina Expedition Web Server

The Tahina Expedition web site and blog has been moved to new server software. If you’ve been using a RSS reader, you may see a flood of repeated posts – that’s because we switched over to the new server (also, the RSS feeds are experimentally shorter – leave a comment if you don’t like this). We are now a WordPress site. Most of the improvements help enhance our ability to publish the content. We can now more easily make blog posts via E-mail, it’s easier to publish changes to the site design, and there’s a number of other administrative features that are handy. There are a few new features for you – our readers:

Improved commenting – it’s now much easier for readers to leave comments. You can also follow the comment threads via E-mail.

E-mail support – you can now follow the blog via E-mail (see the envelope icon under “Subscribe” in the right side-bar).

Searching – You now just get excerpts to each post which matches a search. It makes it faster to find posts you are looking for.

Mobile Phone Support – We now provide a mobile phone version of the site (iPhone, Android, etc.) which provides a more phone-readable version of the content. The links to web site pages are in a drop-down menu on most phones. You can still toggle back to the old way if you prefer it (at the bottom of the page).

Special thanks to Mickey Mellen who helps me write the Google Earth Blog and has a lot of experience with WordPress. He did all the work in helping me move the site over to WordPress – and he was blazingly fast!

6 Responses to New Tahina Expedition Web Server

Since the server switch in Google Reader – only the first two lines show up – then I have to “continue reading” at the website. Is this a setting in Reader that I can change back to the old way – or is it a ‘feature’ of the new server ? Bit of a pain to have to go out to the web.

@Greg: the new server defaulted to that behavior (abbreviated text in RSS readers). I planned to give it a try and see what the reaction is. Since our site is in part supported by people seeing the ads, it helps if people view the web site directly. But, if people don’t like it I’ll switch it back to full posts in the RSS feeds.

I also read your posts in Google Reader, and I don’t like having to follow a link to read the entire post. I can be more productive by reading all my RSS content in Reader. However, I understand the implications of feed readers on ad-driven sites, and I won’t stop following you if you leave it this way.

Hi Frank! Love seeing that you switched to WordPress – I’m using WP for several blogs and am really impressed by its flexibility and stability.

While I completely understand the reasoning behind only including post summaries in the RSS feed, I generally unsubscribe from any blog that only has summaries. It’s an efficiency thing for me — I just don’t have time to [ctrl-click,tab,read,close tab,find where I was] for every article. With Google Reader, it’s a single key press [j] to move through new posts.

You could consider FeedBurner inserting ads into your RSS feeds. I used this for a while, and while it doesn’t recoup all of the advertising you could get from AdSense on your site, it is one option.

I really enjoy hearing about your adventures, so I would love to see you switch back to full posts, but I completely understand if you don’t!

Hi, been following this great adventure since 11/2009 and look forward to the posts however I will ditto the others on the inconvenience of having to click an extra link to read the posts in my RSS feed.